FlagFox – Firefox add-on for easier website investigation

Flagfox is an add-on for Firefox that will show the country the websites you visit are hosted in.

If while browsing the net you feel the curiosity of knowing where each website you visit is hosted, Flagfox is the Firefox extension you want. With a simple look, you will know if the web is hosted in USA, China or your own country. It doesn't matter where it is, this extension will quickly tell you.

Flagfox doesn't use a web service to work, it incorporates an IP database, that allows it instantly to identify the location of the web server. To indicate the country, Flagfox doesn't take into account the domain, because the web could be using a domain different to the web servers real global position.

This extension can be very handy if we work in website optimization, or if we want to know the legal jurisdiction of a server, but more importantly the possibility to use it as a security element, because many webs try to supplant other ones indicating that they are in countries that they aren't really in. It is highly unlikely that a German bank will have is website hosted in China.

Besides displaying a country flag depicting the location of the current website's server, add-on allows a multitude of additional tools such as:

* Site safety and malware checks
* Finding similar sites and reviews
* Automatic translation to your language
* SEO and web development research
* Diagnostics like pings and traceroutes
* Whois and DNS information
* Page code validation
* Quick URL shortening
* Copying a server's IP address or other info
* or you can create your own custom actions!

Developers’ website: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/flagfox/

imgBox - Free Fast and Simple Image Hosting for Bloggers

ImgBox is a really useful service, allowing webmasters, bloggers, or just Internet active socializers to host images of classifieds, blogs, websites and forums. The service lets you uploading your images and sharing through hot linking for free. Registration and login is not required to use the service.  The best thing about imgbox is unlimited storage capacity and no expiration time for the images storage, with no conditional inactivity limitation, often applied on other services.

Main Features

• Hot linking is allowed.
• Very fast upload.
• Simple and straightforward interface.
• Drag and Drop supported.
• Reliable services with minimum downtime.
• Single file size – up to 10MB.
• Supports unlimited number of image uploads.
• Unlimited storage space.
• Unlimited storage time.
• Supported Image file types - JPG, GIF and PNG.

Website: http://imgbox.com/

WAVE - Free Tester for your Web Page

WAVE–the Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool–is a free and extremely user-friendly online service to allowing you check, validate, and optimize your web site design and structure.

Instead of providing a complicated-to-understand and hard-to-read textual report on what discovered issues are, this tool displays the page you are checking in and puts small icons with observed issues and notes near the questionable component of the design. With that you will see the problems in contest and formatting very clear, and you will be able some time to get everything fixed. You can instantly find and fix pointed issues in your code.

If you are still in process of building your page, you can also upload individual files, or even paste code into the form, posted on the website, and let it be checked on the fly.

WAVE is a very useful service, especially for newbies, it is free, and it does not require registration.

Website: http://wave.webaim.org/

How to Enrich Facebook Chat and Messages with Emoticons?

Most of you are already using smiley emoticons in your communication. But for many people, that’s about it. So, Facebook recently added a list of emoticons to help you express yourself a bit more than text characters permit. The full list can be used in chat or private messages, and some of the less complex ones can be used in comments on wall posts.

While using short messages to communicate with your friends, emoticons can be considered as the simple and the easiest way of telling other that what you are feeling at that instance. They are able to add emotional context to what you say, and how you say, enriching your capabilities to spice your communication with emotions and associations.

All emoticons can be divided to several groups:

1. Standard Emoticons

2. Advanced Emoticons

3. Coded Emoticons

Besides some of the shown popular shortcuts, there are two categories of emoticons, which require more time and efforts to add. The first category represents popular names, for example, by typing the names of the famous brands, you are calling the actual graphical emoticon associated with it. Note that you need to put the word in the double square brackets to reach desired effect.

Even bigger category of emoticons is compiled with the numeric codes, which are probably hard to remember, therefore their usefulness will be probably limited. For example, there are emoticons with different countries’ flags:

4. Your Own Emoticons

And, finally, if you cannot find what you want on Internet, you can generate your own emoticons from your own pictures with Online Generator. It is really easy to make them with no coding or programming experience. All you have to do is follow the 3 simple steps:

a.       Choose image file from your PC.

b.      Upload it.

c.       Get the code and paste it to Facebook.

Note that chat codes are the easiest way to send images in Facebook chat. You can even create your own chat codes gallery by just saving the codes on your computer and using them again later as all chat codes are reusable.

Sources and Additional Information:

http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57532675-285/add-emoticons-to-your-facebook-chats-and-messages/

http://knowledgeoverflow.com/emoticons/

http://facebookemoticons.com/emoticons/

http://smileychatcodes.com/facebook-smiley-chat-codes/